Pūjāvaliya

The Pūjāvaliya — the “Garland of Offerings” — is one of the great prose works of the Sinhala language, composed in the golden age of Dambadeṇiya, about the year 1270, by the elder Mayūrapāda Buddhaputta, at the request of the minister Deva Pratirāja, in the reign of Paṇḍita Parākramabāhu the Second.

For seven centuries it has been read aloud, learned by heart, and loved. And yet, until now, it has never been given whole into English.from the translator’s preface

Across four-and-thirty chapters it unfolds the Nine Virtues of the Awakened One; but at its heart lies pūjā, offering — the long history of how the world has honoured the Buddha, ending, in its last chapter, with a history of Laṅkā itself. Only that thirty-fourth chapter was translated, by B. Gunasekara, in 1895. The one-and-thirty chapters between have waited a hundred and thirty years.

The prose is translated once, faithfully, and that faithful translation is the reading text. There is no rougher crib hidden behind a smoother paraphrase: the Sinhala is itself exalted, ceremonial prose, and to render it faithfully is already to render it in a grave and cadenced English. Faithfulness and beauty are here one act. The verses alone are given twice — a rhymed rendering in the body, after the manner of the older English devotional poets, and a plain construe in the notes.

The text followed is the critical edition of K. Ñāṇavimala. Pāli originals, sources, and the occasional doubtful reading are gathered into the endnotes. The book is set in Cardo, after the humanist types of the Italian Renaissance, and printed to be kept.

A companion, in spirit, to A Stream of Delights: two medieval island books, two first complete English translations, the inner library of Sinhala Buddhism opened at last.